When Falun Gong practitioners held a signature drive in front of the Sydney Town Hall on June 28, 2014, Australians responded.

Upon learning about the persecution of this peaceful cultivation practice, especially the forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners in China, they showed their support with their signatures, calling on the Australian government to help bring an end to this crime against humanity.

An Australian citizen signed the petition after reading about the forced organ harvesting. He hesitated initially, because he was going to visit China in the near future and he was afraid that he would be denied access by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because he had signed the petition. Practitioners explained to him that the petition was to be submitted to the Australian government, not the CCP. He left with the truth-clarification materials and returned shortly after, to sign his name after he did some reading.

The Australian Medical Association of Queensland held a Junior Doctor Conference on June 28, 2014 in downtown Brisbane. Falun Dafa practitioners held a series of activities to raise awareness in the medical profession and the local community about the ongoing crime of forced organ harvesting in China.

Falun Dafa practitioners held a series of activities downtown Brisbane to expose the persecution.Many people in the medical profession, including doctors and professors, signed the petition to condemn the atrocities after learning about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) brutal suppression of Falun Gong and state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting from living practitioners.

After signing the petition, a doctor said to a practitioner that it was unethical to remove anyone’s organs for any reason without the person’s voluntary consent, “Everyone should have the right to decide where his organs go. If we could do something (to stop live organ harvesting), we all have the responsibility to make sure that we do so. We should try to prevent such illegal actions.”

“We want to tell people about the human rights abuses of Falun Gong practitioners in China. It is a really good opportunity as a lot of media attention focused on the Chinese prime minister’s visit,” said British Falun Gong practitioner Lee Hall, who participated in a peaceful protest across from 10 Downing Street on June 17, 2014, where British Prime Minister David Cameron received his Chinese counterpart, Li Keqiang.

The practitioners’ protest, which condemned the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution of Falun Gong and the CCP’s atrocity of forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners, has garnered support from the public. A number of people spoke out to protest the persecution and to call on the British government to consider human rights first when dealing with China.

The practitioners called for bringing former Chinese President Jiang Zemin and other perpetrators of the persecution to justice. They also encouraged more Chinese people to learn about Falun Gong and the CCP’s crimes, and renounce the CCP and its affiliated organizations.

Falun Gong practitioners hold a peaceful protest against the persecution in front of the British Prime Minister’s office during the Chinese Prime Minister’s visit.

It was a privilege to revisit Taipei in early April to support the “Sunflower Movement” and its well-founded concerns about Taiwan as a democratic and sovereign nation. Permit me to mention some points I made outside the Legislative Yuan:

Public support for the Sunflower coalition of students, academics, civic organizations grew increasingly during three weeks of protest; one estimate was that a half million persons joined one support rally.

Taiwan has become one of the strongest practitioners of multi-party democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, human dignity/equality, freedom of speech/assembly and independent media in Asia; this must not be lost now or ever.

The occupation of the Legislative Yuan was precipitated by a trade-in- services agreement with China–both its substance and the undemocratic way the Ma government attempted to ram it through without due legislative consideration. Legislator Chang Ching-chung, the KMT chairman of a legislative committee, declared the clause-by-clause review of the pact completed after 30 seconds—a flagrant abuse of the Yuan’s procedural rules.

GRAND CANYON, Ariz.–Falun Dafa practitioners set up a display this month hoping to tell Chinese and other tourists about a situation they said the Chinese communist regime is concealing.

“We are trying to raise awareness because the Chinese don’t get any truth inside their country because their media is all propaganda, propagandized,” said Mel Etherton, one of the display’s organizers. Banners at the canyon said “Falun Gong is Good” and “Stop the Killing of Falun Gong for Organs.”

Seven Wonders
The group chose the canyon for its fame. “The Grand Canyon is a popular destination for Chinese tourists,” said Fen Ho, an Arizona Falun Gong practitioner. In China, students are taught about “the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, and the Grand Canyon is one of them.”

By Epoch Times
Medical professionals from around the globe attending the 2014 International Transplantation Congress in London last week condemned the widespread non-consensual organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. All, that is, except for one Chinese delegate who has carried out transplant operations that number in the thousands.
The number of organ transplant operations taking place in China has seen a surge in recent years, following the persecution and mass arrests of practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline which follows the Chinese traditions of meditation and self-cultivation.
Preceding the persecution, the number of liver transplant surgeries was recorded at 118 in the years between 1991 and 1998. After the persecution began in 1999, numbers began to multiply steadily with close to 4,000 recorded liver transplants in 2005. Increases in other organ transplant surgeries were also found, with no accompanying rise in donation rates, along with transplantation centres claiming matches of suitable organs within two weeks.

Until some point in May it was possible to go to the unassumingly titled cntransplant.com website and, then and there, place a phone call to arrange a transplant organ from a hospital in Tianjin, China.

“Medinet Healthcare Center. … We are the fruits of one tree, leaves of one branch,” the site once beckoned.

“We … are here to assist the patients in getting a kidney, liver or heart transplantation in China.” Its hospitals, the site said, operated with all appropriate licenses, and “are surely where the dying patients reborn.”

Patients, known as “transplant tourists,” would then fly to China to get their new organs and emerge “reborn.”

Organs of this sort in China invariably come from executed prisoners—though the type of prisoner is disputed. China is in the shaky beginning stages of attempting to set up a voluntary organ donation system, to exist alongside the harvesting of organs from prisoners.

THE BOOK
The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem
by Ethan Gutmann

The inside story of China’s organ transplant business and its macabre connection with internment camps and killing fields for arrested dissidents, especially the adherents of Falun Gong.

Mass murder is alive and well. That is the stark conclusion of this comprehensive investigation into the Chinese state’s secret program to get rid of political dissidents while profiting from the sale of their organs–in many cases to Western recipients. Based on interviews with top-ranking police officials and Chinese doctors who have killed prisoners on the operating table, veteran China analyst Ethan Gutmann has produced a riveting insider’s account–culminating in a death toll that will shock the world.

In the spring of 1989, following the death of the former reform-minded Party Secretary Hu Yaobang, hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents took their complaints about widespread party corruption and other governance issues to the streets. Shielded by the presence of numerous foreign journalists covering the visit to China’s capital by then President Mikhail Gorbachev of Russia, many also demanded democracy, the rule of law and freedom of media. Their courage inspired demonstrations in 80 cities across the country, and estimates that about 100 million persons from all walks of life participated in the protests.

Then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who had twice been purged by hard-liner Mao and thus might have become a bridge to post-communism, pluralism and representative government, like his visitor Gorbachev, tragically opted instead to characterize events as a “counterrevolutionary riot.” Wuer Kaixi, one of the protest leaders, noted, “We repeatedly communicated to senior levels of the government that if they wished the students to withdraw they had to ‘give them a ladder to stand down’… or else they would not go.”

“It is a crime against humanity. It’s against human rights. And it needs to stop!” were some of the comments made by Howard P. Monsour, Jr., M.D., chief of Hepatology at Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, on organ harvesting in China. “I think there’s an awareness going on, and there definitely needs to be more, a more concerted effort to make sure it stops.”

Dr. Monsour was among the many participants of the 2014 Joint International Congress on organ transplants who voiced their support for ending the crimes of organ harvesting in China and signed the DAFOH petition to the UN.

Some of these medical professionals indicated that they already knew about the crimes in China, and appreciated the opportunity that the Falun Gong practitioners provided outside of the conference venue for them to take an active part in helping end it.

The updated DAFOH (Doctors against Forced Organ Harvesting) petition builds on the momentum of a successful 2013 campaign, which resulted in 1.5 million signatures globally. It continues to urge the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to call upon China to end the crimes against humanity and initiate further investigations.

By China’s Forbidden News
With the exposure of the CCP’s living organ harvest on Falun Gong practitioners, the mainland people’s signature collection in protest against it continues to grow. After the first three times nearly 18,000 signatures were collected. A few days ago, the media reported that 4700 signatures were collected to condemn the CCP’s atrocity in the Tangshan area from January to May. According to the U.S. Minghui report from Hebei on June 4th, since January a total 4688 signatures were collected in Tangshan calling on the CCP to stop the atrocity of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners.

A public lecture at the Galbraith Building, University of Toronto, 28 May 2014

I want in this talk to cover two topics: the evidence of the killing of Falun Gong for their organs; and recent developments in China on this issue.

Evidence

I am a lawyer in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in private practice. My clients are primarily refugee claimants seeking protection in Canada. I have been engaged in this work for almost all of my professional career.

Because my clients flee human rights violations, I have become familiar through my work with the human rights situation in many countries, including China. I try, as best I can, not only to assist my clients in obtaining protection, but also to combat the human rights violations which caused them to flee. In addition to tribunal and court work for individual clients, I have become involved in research, writing, advocacy and activism in the broader human rights scene.

It is a pleasure to be back in Greece, where your nation has had such a profound influence on so many of the world’s civilizations, including their philosophy, literature, art, sculpture, theatre, music and governance during about thirty centuries.

Falun Gong Persecution

Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) is a spiritual discipline which seeks to improve body and ethics. It contains features of traditional systems, like Chinese Qigong, Buddhism and Daoism (Taoism), combined with a set of gentle exercises. Because it grew astonishingly rapidly across China from its inception in 1992, the Party saw it as a threat, labeled it a cult, and commenced persecution against practitioners from mid-1999 to the present day.

The Help Free China campaign has evolved from the award-winning documentary film“Free China: The Courage to Believe”, co-produced by NTD Television (a non-profit media network) and World2Be Productions. The film, which was completed and released theatrically in June 2013, not only raises awareness about the illicit organ transplant trade in China but it’s also a powerful story about how we can unite and peacefully stand up against oppression.

Today, despite the facade of economic progress, China still remains a dictatorship. All media are censored and controlled by the Communist Party. Perhaps worse still, right now, there’s a form of genocide taking place, where millions of innocent people are put into slave labor camps…and even killed for their organs.

The Medical Society of Virginia (MSV) has passed a resolution to condemn systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting in China and to express its support for a pending House Resolution in the U.S. Congress of the same nature.

“It [organ harvesting] is medical malpractice, immoral. I would consider it a modern holocaust in medicine,” said Dr. Manuel M. Belandres, the initiator of the resolution, an MSV member and a general trauma surgeon. “And the only way to stop that is to give them a voice of conscience. It is not the right way to do things, to harvest organs. It’s state-sanctioned… It’s totally, absolutely wrong and a new form of evil,” Dr. Belandres said.

The resolution calls for “a full and transparent investigation by the United States Department of State into organ transplant practices in the People’s Republic of China, and for the prosecution of those found to have engaged in such unethical practices.”

As the rest of the world has learned about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) crime of harvesting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners, so have the citizens of China. They have expressed shock and dismay at what the CCP is capable of.

Local citizens from Tangshan City in Hebei Province, Tianjin City, Qinhuangdao, Zhangjiakou City, and others have signed petitions protesting this brutal practice. They have also demanded an investigation into the crimes of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang for participating in this crime.

The horror is so hard for people to believe that local citizens are beginning to see through the lies of the Chinese government. They have begun to express their heartfelt feelings, saying, “How can people be this evil?”

The Chinese regime’s macabre practice of killing prisoners of conscience for their organs and selling them to transplant tourists for “huge money” has not abated—that was the grim message imparted at a University of Toronto seminar on May 28.

Forced organ harvesting in China was the topic of the seminar, and Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer David Matas told his audience that the vast majority of organs are seized by killing illegally imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners who are targeted by the state.

Matas is co-author of two books on the subject, Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs and State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China. His work on drawing attention to the issue worldwide since 2006 garnered him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2010.

On Wednesday, 28 May 2014 from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM (EDT) Toronto, Ontario David Matas, a Canadian human rights lawyer, will speak about the continuing Chinese practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners of conscience.

In China a heart can be purchased and transplanted for about $130,000, a kidney for $62,000.

The organs are largely harvested from prisoners of conscience, such as Falun Gong members, and purchased by desperate transplant tourists who fly in and out without considering the source. The practice made international headlines in 2006 with a report by Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer David Matas, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. He turned that study into a book, Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs.

Around a dozen MPs of all stripes attended festivities on Parliament Hill Wednesday to celebrate the 22nd anniversary of Falun Dafa, also called Falun Gong. The spiritual discipline was introduced to the public on May 13, 1992, in northeastern China by Mr. Li Hongzhi, and has since spread around the world.

To mark the occasion, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as well as several MPs, sent greeting letters to the Falun Dafa Association of Canada. In his letter, Harper relayed a message of support for FDAC’s efforts to stop the suppression and persecution of adherents by the Chinese regime, which began in July 1999.

“Last year, our government was pleased to launch Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom to encourage the protection of religious minorities around the world so that all can practice their faith without fear of violence or repression. The Falun Dafa Association of Canada is a valued partner in these efforts,” Harper wrote.

Ethan Gutmann’s interview on “Uighur attacks in China” can be heard on “China takes over the world” a hot Hong Kong Radio show.

LISTEN TO RADIO INTERVIEW

A new book titled Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: U.S.-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century says that competition between China and the United States is inevitable but it can be limited to avoid the worst outcomes. Michael O’Hanlon, a coauthor of the book and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, joins us to explain how this can be accomplished.

In the second half of the show, Ethan Gutmann, veteran investigative journalist, talks about the recent horrific attacks in China that the government has condemned as acts perpetrated by Uighur separatists. Ethan also talks about his forthcoming book, The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem.